Sarah Schmidt draws upon Skylab Gallery roots in curating Adult Swim program

When Adult Swim reached out to animator Sarah Schmidt to curate an episode of “Off the Air,” her mind instinctively drifted to the years she spent in Columbus, and in particular to the early days of Malt Adult, the long running animation series she launched at the recently shuttered downtown art space Skylab Gallery.

“Our friend Freddie Crocheron, who I had do the titles for one of the sequences, he was living at Skylab for a while, and he had a post yesterday where he was all ‘Ohio against the world’ about it,” Schmidt said from her current home in Chicago, joined for an early December interview by artist/actor Hakim Callwood and filmmakers Cameron Granger and Jeffery Grant . “And even though I’m not there anymore, technically everybody in this episode I met in those Ohio years, and a lot of them through Skylab.”

Owing to these deep-set roots, it’s fitting that Schmidt opted to center her 11-minute contribution to “Off the Air” on the theme of “plants,” with each of the 15 submitted segments – the bulk of which clock in at less than a minute – touching in some way on the concept. 

“I feel like a lot of it was coming back to nature and coming back to what’s comfortable, which to me is a place like Skylab,” said Schmidt, who first gravitated toward the space for Malt Adult because of how comfortably it served as a bridge between her fine art and animation friend groups. “When [Adult Swim] reached out, they told me to pick a theme I was passionate about, and I love plants. … When I counted, and I think I had like 50-some plants in pods across my studio and apartment. And I’m vegan, so I love plants in that capacity, too. … So, there’s this funny through line in [the episode] for me, but then everybody had this thread of caring through their pieces.”

This gentler touch helps to differentiate Schmidt and Company’s contribution from the usual fare on Adult Swim, an animation block on Cartoon Network whose programs tend heavily toward surrealism and irony. (For comparison, a different episode of “Off the Air” helmed by a friend of Schmidt’s and scheduled to air at some point this season is built on the idea of “cringe.”)

Schmidt’s episode, scheduled to air on Adult Swim at 4 a.m. ET every morning this week, includes contributions from 21 artists working across the mediums of animation and film. Among these is a 60-second short from filmmaker Cameron Granger, made in collaboration with local director Jeffery Grant and featuring the acting talents of Columbus artist Hakim Callwood, whose character makes a living performing exorcisms of public spaces.

“A lot of my work deals with the haunting of our neighborhoods, and the loss and grief caused by urban development, gentrification [and] things like that,” said Granger. “And so, having this character come in who exorcizes these demons, these ghosts, is something I’ve been thinking about a lot.”

The small crew filmed the short in late summer at Scioto Audubon Metropark, which itself has been the site of ongoing redevelopment, including the removal of an adjacent highway overpass and the construction of a new brewery and office space, among other updates, which added additional layers of complexity to the short. “I shot my thesis film there in 2016, and it was like, ‘Oh, the hill I shot on is not there anymore, so we need to rework this,’” Granger said. “I’m often writing with these places in my brain that I can’t necessarily see physically, so when I get to a place, there are physical workarounds that need to happen. And with the Audubon park, I had to go there the day before we shot, because I didn’t know what it was going to look like, because Columbus is changing like every week.”

Granger said he tends to write the characters in his films in a similar manner, generally working with specific people in mind and often returning to a core group of five or six friends, most of whom he has known the better part of a decade. These include Callwood and the Columbus rapper Dom Deshawn, who appears briefly as a spirit in the “Off the Air” short.

“When I’m thinking of the characters, I have this Rolodex of people in my brain,” said Granger, who immediately circled in on Callwood to portray the exorcist, owing to everything from the artist’s recognizable appearance to his charming, easygoing demeanor. “And with this exorcist, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is a Hakim character. This is someone who has that sort of main-character-type energy.’”

“I always say Cameron will not rest until he’s made me a movie star,” cracked Callwood, who said he prepared for the role by watching the “Stinkmeaner Strikes Back” episode of the animated series “Boondocks,” which features an exorcism. “But I’m spoiled getting to work with Cam, because he already knows me so well, and he’s writing these characters based on me. … So, when he told me we were doing something for Adult Swim and asked if I would be in, I didn’t ask any questions.”

In conceiving the short, Granger said he knew from the jump that he would film in Columbus, working alongside a close handful of people with whom he has long collaborated, including production assistant Akillah Clark and Grant, who has assisted Granger on a number of projects since the two first crossed paths years back at the Franklinton gallery Roy G Biv. 

“As soon as Cam hit me up, it could have been anything and I would have said yes,” said Grant, whose interest in filmmaking is rooted in a fondness he shares with Granger for surrealism and Afro-futurism. “I always like those things that are a little wonky, a little out there. And I think that’s what brought us all together. We’re doing something that will hopefully bring light and joy to people who watch it.”

Collectively, the four people interviewed described their contributions to Adult Swim as something of a love letter to Ohio, with Schmidt giving special acknowledgement to the importance of Skylab in helping to foster her early curatorial voice. 

“Skylab was such a special place to kick it all off, and I think we were able to get something special going there with Malt Adult,” she said. “The connection with Adult Swim feels like a nice evolution of what started in this collective space with this stay-up-late, psychedelic weirdness. And it feels really good to capture some of that in a bottle for 11 minutes.”